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| Born: 4 Jan 1643 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire,
England Died: 31 March 1727 in London, England New created Calculus, for which he is hated by my college students, but you can be grateful for his interests in optics. While he was a student in 1664 he read the work on the subject English physicists named Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. He studied the math and physics of the French philosopher and scientist Descartes. By carefully studying the refraction of light by prism he was able to develop a series of elaborate experiments which allowed him to create measurable mathematical patterns in the phenomenon of color. By arranging prisms in sequence he found that white light to be a mixture of infinitely varied rays (the rainbow). Each color was definable by the angle through which it is refracted on entering or leaving medium. By applying this idea to the interference colors on thin films (oil on water, or soap bubbles), he was able to calculate the thickness of the films. He held that light consisted of streams of minute particles. From his experiments he could infer the magnitudes of the transparent "corpuscles" forming the surfaces of bodies. Newton had many critics of his ideas about colors and defraction which he presented in the late 1600s. The publication of Opticks, largely written by 1692, was delayed until the critics were dead. The book served to articulate his ideas on the subject, as well as establish a precedent for scientific test of theory with quantitative experimentation. More Info |